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Meals on Wheels San Antonio (MOWSA) is days away from starting service for a $20 million contract from the City of San Antonio to deliver hot meals to the city’s senior centers.
It's the second time MOWSAT has received the Healthy Eating Aging and Living (HEAL) contract, which requires the nonprofit to deliver between 2,300 and 2,500 hot meals to San Antonio’s 44 senior centers every day.
MOWSA’s CEO Vinsen Faris said he was thrilled to work with the city again.
“It's a lot of fun, but really, really wonderful engagement to improve [seniors’] health and improve their quality of life,” Faris said. “Us being able to provide a nutritious meal that is tasty, that people enjoy eating, people look forward to — people schedule their visits around some of the menu days — that's pretty cool.”
The contract lasts for four years, with a one-year renewal for a fifth year.
MOWSA’s primary work is delivering meals to seniors at home, which serves as a way to get seniors nutritious meals while also acting as safety checks and a way to prevent social isolation. It delivers 3,100 meals a day through this program.
Faris said an added benefit of the partnership between MOWSA and the city is that when seniors are no longer able to visit the senior centers, MOWSA can work with them to smoothly transition to home food deliveries.
“It's been a win-win for everybody,” he said.
The MOWSA mission expands to be even more community-focused with its senior center work.
“Breaking bread together is a big deal,” Faris said. “Breaking bread together with a meal that you really enjoy, knowing that it's a healthy meal is even a bigger deal.”
Seniors who want to take advantage of the senior center meals must first register at their local senior center. Faris said they will then be able to reserve their meals ahead of time.
The major city contract comes at a time when MOWSA is bracing to lose funds from the federal government, which provides a quarter of the nonprofit’s funding and which made sharp cuts to the department that provides that funding, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, earlier this year.
“We've always looked at it as if that money is here and available to us, we can put it to really good use,” Faris said. “And should it go away? That means that there's fewer people that we can serve, but we're going to do our dead-level best to serve as many as we can, as best we can.”
He said MOWSA’s work is essential and worth the cost.
“Some people say, ‘well, you shouldn't use taxpayer dollars anyway,’” Faris said. “Well, yes, you should, because we are actually saving taxpayers dollars. We are keeping people out of the emergency rooms. We are keeping people out of hospitals. We are keeping people out of long-term care rehab facilities, EMS services are not as tied up as they could be, because we are serving people Meals on Wheels. It's been proven.”
Faris encouraged members of the community who want to support MOWSA’s work to sign up to volunteer online.
